What to eat during a snow storm - Part 3

Spinach, Caramelized Onion, and Goat Cheese Pie

December 22

It continues to snow, which is really unusual for Portland. We got about another six inches last night on top of the ice which was on top of the previous six inches. Even the dogs think that the novelty is wearing thin.

The spinach pie turned out well. The crust uses olive oil instead of shortening and it uses considerably less oil than if you were using shortening, so it doesn’t produce as flaky a crust. The process is similar though in that you mix the flour and the oil first in order to coat the flour which keeps it from producing as many glutens. I use about a quarter or a third of a cup of oil to 2 cups of flour (which is more than enough for a normal sized pie). I add as much water as I need to get it to come together. I’m not sure exactly how much because I do it more by feel than by measurement.

For the filling I started by caramelizing four medium onions in olive oil. Once they were deep brown, I added some garlic, about a pound of spinach, a pinch of thyme and a tiny pinch of nutmeg (if you can taste it distinctly it’s too much). Once that’s all put together, you need to pull it off the heat and give it about 20-30 minutes to cool. Then add about 4-5 ounces of a soft fresh goat cheese (like chevre). You could add another kind of cheese, like feta, but I had goat cheese on hand so I used that.

I had rolled a bottom crust and put it in a pie pan, added the filling and then rolled the top crust. I put a couple of slits in the top and baked it for 25-30 minutes at 350 until it was browned. It does need a few minutes to cool before you cut and serve it. I served it with more pilsner because pilsner is crisp enough to cut through the richness of the goat cheese. It also has a hint of malt sweetness that works well with the sweetness form the onions. If I was having wine I’d go with an unoaked (or at least lightly oaked) sauvignon blanc. It can be tough to match wine to cheese (despite the fact that you always see cheese and wine served together), and a good friend doesn’t like to pair red wines with spinach dishes because the iron content of the spinach can affect the taste of the wine. But I’ve always been a fan of fresh goat cheeses and sauvignon blanc. But as always, it’s tough to beat a good pilsner with food.

What to eat during a snow storm - Part 2

December 21

The weather continues to be dreadful. We got ice on top of 6+ inches of snow and it’s back to snowing full bore again. Last night’s meal of small plates ended after two courses, because the plates weren’t as small as I had thought.

I started with mushrooms sautéed in olive oil with fresh rosemary, garlic and amontillado sherry. I had bought enough mushrooms for four but ended up cooking for two, so our first course was actually double sized. I paired it with a Sierra Nevada Celebration ale, which for those who don’t know it, is essentially an American IPA. I was thinking the piney flavors and aromas of the Cascade hops would pair nicely with piney-ness of the rosemary and it did work out pretty well. The spelt bread was good but not as crusty as I like but it was certainly loads better than the typical things that pass as baguettes or rustic breads at the average supermarket bakery (which is too often home to characterless “French” and “Italian” bread).

The second course was shrimp escasbeche. Escabeche is a family of Spanish dishes that are essentially pickled. They originate from the days before refrigeration where foods were cooked in olive oil and vinegar and then left to sit in it. The large amounts of vinegar and oil acted a preservative and allowed people to keep poultry and fish for longer periods. Today it’s still cooked because people enjoy the flavors. You can pretty much cook anything escabeche and then serve it hot, cold or room temperature. I start by heating olive oil gently and then adding onions and garlic and letting them cook down slowly and infuse the oil. Later I add some herbs (more rosemary in this case because it’s still sticking out above the snow) and then vinegar and a little white wine. Once this mixture comes together, add the main ingredient. I this case it was shrimp. Because they cook fairly quickly, I turn the heat off after I add them and pull the pan from the burner and let them finish cooking in the residual heat. If you’re cooking something more substantial, like chicken pieces, you can put the pot in the oven and leave it for 1-2 hours on a low heat.

To serve it, remove the main ingredient (the shrimp in my case), and then ladle some of the sauce into another pan and reduce it by about a third or half. Then pour the sauce over the shrimp and serve it with crusty bread. I actually had some homebrewed pilsner with this one. Not for any reason other than the fact that I love good pilsner and still think it’s one of the most food friendly beer. Although Spain is considered a wine drinking country, I prefer beer with foods cooked with a lot of vinegar since vinegar can make most wines taste thin and sharp. The malt sugar and the hop bitterness of pilsner actually stands up better (but a good lambic or acidic wit bier would be very nice as well).

Tonight I’m sticking to something simple: a spinach, caramelized onion and goat cheese pie. The crust is made form olive oil instead of shortening which gives it a distinctive taste. No idea what I’ll drink with it yet, but I’m sure I’ll find something.

What to eat during a snow storm - Part 1

December 20, 2008

Last week was supposed to be our annual snow storm here in Portland, but it turned out to only be the precursor for the real storm which is going on right now. They’re predicting 6-10 inches of snow in Portland before it switches over to freezing rain and finally rain sometime late tomorrow. Lovely.

We were supposed to have friends over for dinner tonight but they cancelled because of the weather. I sort of expected that to happen but figured I’d better buy the food just in case. Of course I hadn’t actually finalized a menu, and had figured on something sort of Spanish inspired and likely served as tapas or small plates. So I have mushrooms, shrimp, a pork tenderloin, potatoes, spinach, goat cheese, some red peppers and a package of Serrano ham courtesy of my brewing partner. I’ll likely spend the day cooking a variety of tapas. Nothing better than eating great food when there’s a blizzard outside.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any adequate bread so I made some bread earlier and it’s rising now. I make adequate, but not great, bread. It’s one thing I wish I did a lot better. One problem is I don’t do it enough. Oh, and I don’t really follow recipes. I have a basic recipe that I use that can work for anything from focaccia to pizza dough to actual bread. It's roughly three cups of flour, a teaspon of salt, a teaspoon or more of yeast, and 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of water. I just kind of vary the types of flour and add more or less water depending on what I’m making. Sometimes I add olive oil as well (particularly if I'm making pizza dough). Today’s is 1/3 spelt and 2/3 white bread flour plus water, salt and yeast.

All I’ve decided so far is that I’ll start with sautéed mushrooms with olive oil, garlic, sherry, and rosemary (I'm using rosemary since the snow has pretty much buried and likely killed my parsley). But I can’t do that until the bread is baked because eating sautéed mushrooms without bread on the side just seems wrong.

At this point all I have are ideas for the other dishes: olive oil roasted potatoes with a spicy tomato and pepper sauce on the side (kind of like the sauce that’s used for potatoes brava), shrimp escabeche served at room temperature, chicken thighs wrapped in Serrano ham braised in a sherry and garlic sauce, spinach and goat cheese empanadillas.

Drinking a lovely home made lambic right now but I’ll need to decide what to drink with everything else later. Stay tuned.

Cooks vs Chefs and Craft vs Art

It seems that in many people’s minds, there’s little difference between and cook and a chef. The phrase chef is bandied about pretty routinely and many home cooks and amateurs don’t think twice before calling themselves a chef. This is wrong, and a little insulting to the people who have put in the time and effort to rise to the level of Chef.

“Chef” is a title that’s earned. It’s French for chief and traditionally a Chef heads up a kitchen brigade. The fact that brigade has a military meaning wasn’t coincidental and it’s not lost on a Chef. Most kitchens are run very similar to the military. There’s hierarchy and the classical kitchen demands absolute discipline from its workers. Although the Kitchen Brigade goes back several centuries, credit for its modern organization goes to August Escoffier, who simplified and codified haute French cuisine in the early 20th century. (If you’ve read Escoffier’s books and looked at his recipes, you may flinch at the idea that he simplified cooking since there’s nothing simple in his cooking.)


Auguste Escoffier, doubtlessly thinking of new ways to put fear into his Brigade

At the top of the kitchen is the Chef de Cuisine, who runs the kitchen. He creates the menu and oversees all personnel. The Chef de Cuisine may not even cook anymore and may be strictly in an administrative role. He has the last say on every matter. What he says is the Law in the kitchen. Disobeying him results in thrown shoes, shouting matches, humiliation of subordinates, immediate firing and other un-pleasantries.

Below him is the Sous Chef, who is essentially second in command. He gets his orders direct form the Chef de Cuisine, and fills in for the Chef de Cuisine when he’s absent form the kitchen. Below the Sous Chef are the Chef de Parties. There is one Chef de Partie for each station or section in the kitchen: Saucier (sauces and sauté station); Rotisseur (roast station) which may contain sub sections for grill and fry cooks; Poisonnier (fish station); Entremetier (entrée station), which may contain separate stations for soups and vegetables); Garde Manger (cold station which includes hors d’oeuvres, salads, terrines and other
Charcuterie); Patissier (pastry/dessert station); and Boucher (butcher).

Under each Chef de Partie on each station, there are numerous Cuisiniers (cooks) and Commis (junior cooks) as well as apprentices. Historically, you started as an apprentice, worked up to a Commis, then a Cuisinier, and with luck you made it to Chef de Partie. You also would work through different stations in order to learn the basics of the kitchen as a whole.

With many years of work and effort you may become a Sous Chef and with even more you may become a Chef de Cuisine. Working to this level took years. Even becoming a Chef de Partie in a good kitchen took years of work and dedication. It was something that was earned and being called Chef by your cooks and commis was a sign of respect for the time, effort and level of mastery you had attained.

So don’t throw the word chef around like it doesn’t matter. If you cook at home, you’re a cook, not a chef. There are no home chefs. We’re all just cooks, no matter how talented we are (or think we are). Give these real Chefs their due; they’ve earned it.

With the rise of celebrity chefs in this country, there’s another trend that’s developed that I find a little bothersome. It seems that all fine cooking, and winemaking and beer making is starting to be called an art and not a craft. Generally this isn’t being done by Chefs themselves, but by their admirers.

But cooking (and brewing for that matter) is a craft. Look at the whole Brigade system and the way that people advance. It’s years of dedication, and there’s an awful lot of repetition along the way. Bakers learn to make baguettes by making them day after day and year after year. A commi learns to make brown stock and demi glace and makes it every day for years. Cooks learn to make a dish correctly by making it day after day under the eye of a chef who makes sure it’s consistent every day.

There are creative elements, but those are mostly enjoyed by the people designing the dishes and not always by the cooks who make them. Cooks turn out the food that they’re told to make. And good cooks do it well and consistently. That alone makes it a craft and not an art.

The same thing goes for brewing and winemaking. Most brewers have to brew the same recipe and have it come out the same each time, because customers demand consistency. There are skills in cooking and brewing, and you need quite a lot of knowledge to do them well. But let’s remember that it’s a craft.

That’s why the only way to become a better cook is to cook more often. Make the same thing over and over until you know how to make it. Why do Italian grandmothers make the Sunday ragu so well? Because they’ve done it every week for 50 years, which means they’ve made it 2600 times. If you did it that often you’d be good at it too. (If you worked as a professional cook and did it five times a week, it would still take you 10 years to get that much experience.) You would know what worked best. So stop reading this and get cooking. Your food will only get better.

Vegetarianism, Fish, Lamb, Scallops and, strangely, Gordon Ramsay

My wife has returned to vegetarianism. This was kind of an unexpected turn. I wanted to explain to her that vegetarianism can be cured by eating meat, but this seemed like a bad idea. Luckily she isn’t expecting me to become a vegetarian as well, although there are a lot of vegetarian dishes that I love and cook on a regular basis, and she will still eat fish occassionally. Initially, I thought this would be a huge drag (especially since I just bought a whole 12 pound NY strip loin that I cut into steaks), but so far it’s working out well. She did tell me that she feels better already (after about ten days) and she said it without sounding smug. (Nothing worse than a born-again vegetarian.)

The unexpected upside is that I’m now allow to eat whatever I want so long as there are enough things to make up an adequate vegetarian meal for her. I’m normally against cooking multiple entrees, particularly on a week night, because it takes more time, dirties more pots, etc. But I’ve done it a few times and am actually excited about the possibilities. As I mentioned, she will eat fish occasionally, but the big issue is that she doesn’t really like fish that much, and tends to prefer the milder sorts of fish. I, on the other hand, love fish. In fact I love all kinds of fish including a lot of the darker and oilier ones that a lot of people find too strong and some of the scary things like skate wing. So now I find myself with an opportunity to cook fish more often and so far I’ve been taking advantage of it. Recently, I made her a mushroom stew, with mushrooms, onions, garlic, and thyme, which I served over polenta. I sautéed a piece of orange roughy for myself, served it on polenta and stole just enough of the mushrooms to use as a topping to the fish. We both had some sautéed yellow and green baby zucchini with basil and garlic on the side. We were both more than pleased with the results. (The baby zucchini were from the farmer’s market and were incredibly good.)

The next night was faux-Chinese. I made tofu in black bean sauce, stir fried Italian kale with red chiles, ginger, and garlic, steamed rice, and steamed fish with scallions, ginger, soy and sesame oil. It’s one of the simplest fish preparations and also one of the best. You get subtle flavoring from the aromatics and the purity of the fish comes through. I hadn’t steamed a fish in ages and it was so incredibly good. Now, I need to track down some oily fish or skate wing.

The other thing that I’ve missed for a long time is lamb. It’s absolutely my favorite red meat. But my wife would never eat it because it was in the “cute animal” food group (along with duck, venison, rabbit and other furry and cuddly things). Tonight, I’m having lamb. At least I think so. I’m not going shopping until later and I don’t know if I’ll find something that’s up to snuff. I’m hoping to get some kind of lamb that I can marinade quickly and grill, but I can get her Portobello mushrooms. (That’s the other interesting thing. I like mushrooms a lot, but she loves mushrooms and is more than happy to eat more of them). So this may really work out after all. The irony is that she’s told me all along that I could cook whatever for me and she’s fine with something else, but I was always the one to refuse. Now it’s opened a whole new door.

I’ve made a whole lot of other great things of late as well, but haven’t written about them. One of them was something that my wife loved and may be requested for her birthday, so she asked me to write about it so I don’t forget it. I was heading home a little late from work and didn’t want to cook anything too involved because I didn’t want to wait. I had some scallops at home (big sea scallops) and stopped to get some white mushrooms but they were out. So I picked up some shitakes instead and a loaf of bread. I cut a carrot and an onion into brunoise (tiny dice for you non-geeks), sweated them in olive, cut the shitakes in half and then sautéed them quickly, deglazing them with a little white wine and the juice form half and orange. I seared the scallops in a pan with a little olive oil, plated the vegetables in the center of two plates, and then put the cooked scallops on top. I had the other half of the orange left, so I deglazed the scallop pan with orange juice, reduced it and then added a dab of butter to mount it. The sauce went over and around the scallops and I served the bread on the side. I don’t know why I decided to use orange instead of lemon, but it made all the difference. It was incredibly simple, but shows what you can do quickly with good ingredients.

I think the scallops were influenced by reading Gordon Ramsay’s A Chef for All Seasons. Many (most?) people know him as the loud, rude chef from Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, but the guy can cook, really cook. His book has a lot of the things you would expect form a top chef: cook things that are in season, buy great ingredients, etc. Nothing new in that. Every celebrity chef gives that same advice (because it’s true). But his food is really well done. It’s clever without being ostentatious and doesn’t get overly complicated (well for the most part). He also cooks a lot of fish. In fact he likely has more recipes for fish than for various meats. It was interesting to see that his food really is as good as his reputation would suggest. He has a talent for creating dishes that look good, are relatively easy to make and make sense. There’s nothing done for flash or show. All the elements of his dish make sense, even when he mixes seemingly unrelated ingredients. I really should look at more of his food.

Charcuterie Update - Making Hams at Home

I’ve been doing a fair amount of charcuterie at home of late. Although I always do some, it seems that recently, I’ve always had a project going. I’ve been making bacon and pancetta on a regular basis for more than a year and had dabbled with some brine cured hams and things like tasso, but hadn’t really done much curing of other cuts of pork.

Recently, my wife bought a few boneless pork sirloin roasts at a good price. They were about a pound and a half each. My wife isn’t that familiar with various cuts of meat and is apprehensive of buying cuts that she doesn’t specifically know about lest I disapprove and give her a meat lecture using one of the dogs to model where different cuts are from, which normally gets me in a bit of trouble, (though the dog doesn’t seem to mind his part). But the price on these was so good, she decided to give it a shot (after all, they’d make fine dog food if I didn’t want to use them). Sirloin is normally roasted or cut into chops. I did a bunch of research and couldn’t find anyone who had recipes for curing sirloin. The two pieces were about two inches thick and I thought that they’d be fine for curing in a similar manner to pork belly, so I decided to give it a shot.

I coated the outside of one of them with molasses and then added the basic salt/pink salt/sugar cure I normally use. Then I put it in a zip lock bag in the fridge. One thing I have learned in salting and curing is that it’s easy to overestimate how much salt you need. The first few times, I completely coated the cuts which lead to incredibly over salted finished products. It’s hard to describe how much to put on. It’s something you really need to learn by doing it, but eventually I realized that time is more important than the quantity of salt. I light coating will penetrate the meat given enough time. Cuts 2-3 inches thick normally cure in about a week for me. So, you can start it one weekend and finish it the next.

I took my “ham” out of the ziplock after a week, and then washed it well to remove the surface salt. The color had changed and the meat had firmed up. I left it on a cake rack to dry for about 90 minutes before I put it on the smoker. I have a small smoker. It’s nothing fancy. It’s essentially a small metal box with an electric burner in the bottom. You put a small metal pan filled with wood chips on the burner and eventually you get smoke. Because it’s outside, the temperature in the smoker is largely dependant on the ambient temperature outside. In the winter, it gets to about 80-90 degrees inside. On a hot summer day it gets up to about 125 or so. It was a decent spring day (one of the few we’ve had so far) and I put it in the smoker and added some apple wood chips.

Smoking is an art, and it’s not one that I think I’ve mastered by any means. I have found that I prefer fruit wood for most of the things I smoke. I also like hickory for more traditional barbecue type of things. Apple has become the de facto wood for so many small bacon producers (just check out the bacon at any high end retailer and it’s likely apple smoked), but I’ve also used cherry with nice results. This being the northwest, I also have some alder, but it’s something that’s traditionally used more for fish than anything else.

Smoking does a couple of things. Most of us just think about the actual smoke flavor that it gets, but from a curing and preserving stand point, there’s another more important process that happens during smoking. Smoking helps to reduce the water content, which is essential for long term preservation of meat. As meat smokes, it loses water weight and the texture of the meat firms up. That’s why hams are firmer than fresh cuts. For the small scale curing that I do, where I rarely cure anything more than about 4 or 5 pounds, I can smoke things in a single day. I generally give things between 6-12 hours on the smoker. I’d like to say it’s dependant on the cut, size, etc, but just as often it’s determined by how early I get the meat in the smoker.

In my early attempts at smoking, I always over smoked everything by using too much wood. You don’t need a constant stream of smoke. If the chips in the pan burn away, it’s fine. I will refill it partially every few hours, but even if the pan is empty, the drying process continues. The gentle heat from the burner creates an updraft in the burner, which helps to carry away moisture form the meat. If you over smoke the meat, you can end up with a bitter coating on the outside of the meat. Again, time is more important than the amount of chips. Both curing and smoking aren’t things you can rush. Using extra salt and or more chips won’t compensate for the lack of time.

I left this first “ham” on the smoker for about 8 hours and then finished it on the Weber grill where I let it get to an internal temperature of about 155. It was completely firm and when I cut into it, it was a beautiful red color all the way through. The outside had a mahogany patina to it. It tasted wonderful. It was a little saltier than I wanted but not overdone. The smoke flavor was prominent but the outside pieces didn’t taste bitter or resiny. It was certainly better than anything you could buy at the normal supermarkets. You could order a real country ham that was better, but for $1.48 a pound I was pretty well pleased. (And the leftovers made great omelets.)

I have another one curing now and will smoke it this weekend. Last weekend, I finished some maple cured bacon. I used maple syrup as a base and then salted the meat. It was left on the smoker for about 10 hours and came out perfectly. It’s probably the best bacon I’ve made. Unfortunately, the finished weight was only about a pound and a half. It’s interesting using different sweeteners in the process. Even after a week of curing and 10 hours of smoking, you could still smell the maple syrup on the bacon and it still had a slight maple flavor as well. The molasses cure is a little heavier, but works well with ham. I think it might be a bit much for bacon tough.

The most recent Saveur magazine had an article of curing salmon, which I’ve never done but may in the next few weeks.

Blending Lambic

June 7th

Blending Lambic

We’ve been meaning to blend up some more lambic for the past several weeks, but circumstances didn’t work out and things were delayed. We finally did get around to blending and bottling yesterday and it seems like a really good blend. It might be our best batch of Gueuze yet. Blending is incredibly difficult and I don’t think we’re master blenders, and we don’t try to create a consistent style from batch to batch. But we’ve seen that the final blend is always better than any of the single batch.

As a general rule, we try to create a blend that is roughly 25% three year, 50% two year old and 25% one year old. The older beers generally have considerably more character, but we’ve found that you need some young beer as well to give the final blend some freshness and more depth. The base beer is always 67% pils malt and 33% flaked wheat and we use a normal beer yeast for the first week or two, before we put the beer into carboys for aging. The blends of bugs are added to the carboys and we try to mix it up so that each carboy takes on a different character. The more variety in the base beer, the more possibilities in blending. Often we combine left over parts of older lots and consolidate them into gallon jugs or three gallons carboys. We’ve ended up with two jugs which have small portions of all of the first beers we made five years ago. As a general rule, we use half a gallon from each one, then combine them together and fill the other one with whatever is left over from our other older lots. The next time we blend, we’ll use half of each and then combine them again. It’s similar to a solera in that there’s always a portion of old beer in it.

Our normal blending batch is 8 gallons (based upon the size of our largest bottling bucket). We normally use one gallon of this old, solera style blend to add some backbone and complexity. This batch had the following lots blended into it:

1 Gallon of the Super Old “Solera Style” blend (average age about 4 years old)
1 .5 Gallons from a batch from March 2005
1 Gallon from a batch from February 2006
1 Gallon each from two different batches from December 2006
2.5-3 Gallons from a batch from November 2005

The “solera” blend was quite astounding on its own. The oldest lot was incredibly austere with moderate acidity and good length. It had a lot of peach and apricot flavors plus a good dose of horsiness. The March 2005 beer had more lemon/citrus flavors, more acidity, and a distinct smoky note. The February 2006 lot had a lot of pineapple and orange notes. It almost had a tropical fruit type of thing to it and it was considerably softer and less tart than the other batches. It would clearly add some interesting notes to the final blend, but it was my least favorite batch on it’s own. The two different lots from December 2006 were quite interesting. They had been stored indoors as opposed to in the garage. Although they both used different combinations of bugs, they were both incredibly tart and were the most acidic of all of the batches we tasted. Clearly the warmer temperatures from being aged indoors had favored the growth of the lactobacillus. They both had some smokiness as well and some lemon flavors. One of them had a distinct horsiness as well. They were as tart as anything form Cantillon and each sip made my eyelids quiver slightly (seriously). The final batch from November 2005 was interesting. It had the best overall aroma of any single lots. It had a great mix of horse, smoke, peach, citrus and apricot. On the palate, it seemed very sugary and candy-like. The palate and nose were completely different from each other. The final blend had a little bit of everything. It had good, noticeable acidity, and intriguing nose of citrus and stone fruits, smoke and horsiness. The palate had good depth and great length. The deep flavors of the older lots were nicely balanced by some of the younger, rounder, fruitier and sweeter lots. All this could change as it sits and develops in the bottle. I will likely try a bottle in about 2-3 weeks to see if the flavors are holding or if it’s changing. We’ve had some lots that change completely with six months of aging. We’re hoping this one keeps its general balance because it was so good at the time.

Hopworks Revisited

Hop Works Revisited

We hit Hopworks again last night. One of our friends had just finished the exams for her PhD and we wanted to go someplace to have some food and beer. We got there around 5:30 or so and I’m glad we did. By 6:30 there was a definite line for a table. Unfortunately, they were out of El Diablo, but they did have the newly released Red Ale. I started with the pilsner which I love. They recently brought home a silver medal at the World Beer Cup for this. It’s so nice to see a NW Brewery make pilsner a staple beer. I’d love to see more brewers do it, but I know it can be a major time/space concern. We ordered some Nachofied fries and then some pizza. It being over 90 degrees yesterday, the pils went quickly and I moved to the new Red Ale.

It’s unmistakably a NW style red. Their specs say 5.6% alcohol but it has 55IBU with a strong dry hop aroma. Luckily it has enough malt to stand up to the hops and it’s an excellent beer with food. The IPA on cask is still terrific and it’s no surprise they won a gold medal for that as well. It’s interesting to note that I doidn’t think too much of the IPA when I had it last year at the Oregon Brewer’s Festival. But it was before their brewing system was installed and they had to do contract brewing elsewhere.

I did try the Doppelbock as well, which was very nice as well. It’s not as over-the-top as some other American interpretations but has a great malt profile and the requisite smooth palate. They also had a Baltic Porter on. It’s about 8% ABV, and quite dark. It’s a little roastier than some actual Russian and Baltic ones I’ve had, but still quite nice. At first I thought it had been barrel aged because it had fairly strong and distinctive vanilla notes and almost a little hint of Bourbon. It was a big beer and a good one to end on. I ran into friends in the bar and was tempted to have another pint, but my wife interceded and brought me home. Just as well, since I had sampled a five pints over the course of a few hours anyway.

Interestingly, my wife and our friend started with the pilsner but then switched to the stout. There are a lot of people who seem to think that women don’t like stout, but I never find the evidence. Most of the women I know who drink beer like darker beers. I just thought I should point that out to all the marketing genius’s out there who seem to imply the opposite.

May 13th - Quick Pasta and Pints at Green Dragon

I was contacted by a writer who’s looking to write an article on beer judging and the BJCP. She had spoken to a few people in the Oregon Brew Crew who referred her to me. I had agreed to meet her at Green Dragon for a few pints to discuss beer judging. Being essentially a cheap bastard, I decided to eat at home first before I ran over there. I still had a piece of homemade pancetta that I needed to use or freeze so I cubed some of it and sautéed it. As it browned and rendered its fat, I boiled some pasta. When the pancetta was browned I added more garlic and some crushed red chili pepper. I tossed all this with the pasta and a little pasta water to make a sauce. If I hadn’t been so lazy, I would have chopped some parsley and added that as well but I was in a hurry and was feeling lazy. It’s still one of my favorite quick pastas. Since I was going to Green Dragon I didn’t actually drink anything with it.

I got to Green Dragon a few minutes early and looked over their extensive draft selection. It’s a tough place to get a beer because there’re always too many great beers available. I had been told that the Weihenstephen Doppelbock was available last week but it was long gone by the time I got there so I had to settle for a La Chouffe. It’s still one of my favorite beers, although it is a little different on draft. It’s not as carbonated as the bottle conditioned ones but does have the same, slightly hazy golden color and the signature spicy nose from the yeast. It’s also incredibly easy drinking for an 8% alcohol beer. Luckily they only server it in 8 ounce pours. They were having a Meet the Brewer event with the Mia and Pia’s from Klamath Falls, so in addition to their ridiculous line up of great beers they also had four beers from Mia and Pia’s, including their pilsner, which is a wonderful beer. It wasn’t as hoppy as I thought previous batches were, but it’s got a good malt flavors and, because of its slightly subdued hop bitterness is actually a softer style delicious beer. Style-nazis may say it’s closer to Helles than pilsner, but I wasn’t concerned with splitting hairs. It’s a delicious beer and I was happy to have another opportunity to taste it again. The last beer I had was Six Rivers IPA from McKinleyville, CA. One of the bartenders had just been there and recommended it. It’s darker than many IPA’s and had a lot of caramel richness and sweetness. It had a much bigger and richer malt profile than most IPA’s but had the requisite hop bitterness and good citrus hop aromas and flavors. I’d love to taste more of their beers if they come into this area.

May 11th - White Beans with Pancetta and Foccacia

I had started some pancetta and knew it would be ready this past weekend. I couldn’t find large pieces of pork belly, so I had to make do with a couple of smaller ones. I didn’t use enough garlic in my last batch of pancetta and it did taste a little off, but was mostly fine. I use the basic pancetta recipe from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie but like most recipes, I’ve altered it a little to suit my own tastes. This go around I went a little overboard on the garlic and you could smell it through the bag as it sat in the fridge (I normally keep it in a zip lock as it cures). After curing for seven days, I washed off the cure (and garlic) and let them sit out to dry out some. Despite the intense amount of garlic, these ones came out quite nicely. The color is beautiful and the meat really tastes perfumed. Strangely, the garlic isn’t overwhelming and seems to tame the bay leaf which sometimes seems to strong. I made a pot of white beans with some cubed pancetta, onions, rosemary and parsley. On the side I made a batch of focaccia topped with basil and garlic. Beans and bread is still one of my favorite foods and this didn’t disappoint me.

While I was cooking I had a bottle of the current Full Sail Brewmaster’s Reserve Brown Ale. It’s a really impressive beer. It has full, smooth malt profile with a slightly dry, bitter chocolate note in the finish. The hops play a background role in this beer. It’s all about the malt in this one. It used to be available year round but got dropped from the line up many years ago, because, unfortunately, brown ale doesn’t sell well in the US. (Too low in hops? Too malty?). It would have been a fantastic beer with food, but it didn’t last long. At 6% alcohol, it’s bigger than many English examples, but it’s still an easy drinking beer.

With dinner I actually had a Hair of the Dog Fred, in honor of Fred Echkhardt’s birthday. This bottle had been lingering on the shelves of a supermarket for some time and was showing some age (not in a good way), but it was still a remarkably complex beer. Even though it’s intense and rich, it was a nice match with earthy, comfort food quality of the white beans and focaccia.

May 10th - Brewing and teaching update

Brewing and Teaching Update

Last week’s lecture at a regional gathering of Mensa seemed to go fine. I had been asked to present a one hour discussion on beer for beginners. I broke it down into two basic sections. The first covered the ingredients in beer and tried to give people a lexicon for the various flavors that are contributed by different ingredients. The second area tried to cover some of the more well known and available styles of beers and what types of flavors to look for in each of them. This was followed by an hour long tasting where we tasted through about 8 different styles. I had about 25 people for it and it seemed to go well. The toughest thing was getting everything condensed into an hour and not losing people by carrying on too much.

I’m also trying to work on some single subject lecture/tastings to start sometime in the next few months. I’m trying to fit them into something that would fit the BJCP Continuing Education rules, because it’d be nice to get points for this, but the main focus would be to set up a series of tastings that give people an opportunity to delve much more deeply into a single style of beer and taste 8-12 examples in a single 2-3 hour session. I have no idea on when this may start. I’ve thought about doing this for a few years and hope I’ll actually get it accomplished this year.

Still have a limited amount of beer at home (OK, I guess having four beers on tap at home and a couple bottled batches of lambic-style beers at home isn’t really limited, but….). The brown ale blew last week, about a day after I was raving about how good it was. The Saison is finally kegged and will be ready to drink in a day. The Belgian golden appears to have perennial chill haze, but has a great flavor profile. Nice spice and fruity esters and a distinct orange note. The steam beer continues to be an enjoyable easy drinking beer with great hop aroma. The Biere de Garde/Biere de Noel is likely need the end, because it’s been such a great drinking beer, despite its higher alcohol content.

We brewed more English style pale ale because as we come into warmer weather, it’s nice to have some “standard” beers with lower alcohol. This one was 86% pale malt and 14% Carastan 35L. That may seem a little high for some people, but I them this way. We used Centennial’s for bittering (because we have them and they’re high alpha), but kept the Goldings for the idle and final additions. It ended up about 1.055, which is higher than we expected, but should still fit the bill nicely.

Since we’re coming into raspberry season, we will be blending this year’s Framboise in the next several weeks. We’re down to about 90 gallons of base lambic, so we’ll likely need to brew more. We’re hoping to blend some gueuze at the same time. I still have some of last years, but it’s not as tart as some previous blends. I‘m hoping it will get tarter as it sits in the bottle, but it’s tough to predict how lambic-style beers will age and change.

May 2nd - Steaks with Bleu Cheese and Philip Togni Cabernet

May 2nd - Steaks with Blue Cheese and 1985 Philip Togni Cabernet

My wife recently got My Last Supper from the library, which details what 50 world class chefs said they would have for their last meal on Earth. It’s an interesting book and the responses make for a interesting read. It’s definitely an interesting book to check out. Jose Andres, whose cooking I admire greatly, described a picnic in Asturias, Spain which consisted of piles of incredibly fresh seafood, but also had a course of steaks with Cabrales bleu cheese, which is really what got me going.

I was thinking about steaks and bleu cheese and knew I had to have them. I found a couple of cross rib steaks (which are cut from the Chuck) and some good bleu cheese (not Cabrales unfortunately, but any good, creamy bleu will do for steaks). I’ve been in a roasted potato kick of late, so I had more roasted potatoes and added a few onions into the mix as well. I picked up some mushrooms as well. I grilled the steaks on the Weber over a medium hot fire. Cross rib steaks are incredibly flavorful (most of the chuck cuts are) but can be tough if you cook them too long. I gave them a decent sear but pulled them off when they were still very rare. I put the blue cheese on and watched it start to melt. The potatoes and onions went on the side as did the mushrooms (which I sautéed with garlic and finished with sherry and parsley).

I had a bunch of beers I could have chosen from, but really do love red wine and steaks, so I opened my last 1985 Philip Togni Cabernet. I met Philip Togni when I worked in NY and spoke to him about this wine and he told me that it would never be fully mature and I could be buried with it. That was in 1992. The wine was 23 years old but was in fantastic shape. It wasn’t really as brown at the edge as I would have thought, and it still had a huge tannic bite to it. But it had massive fruit. It had the classic cassis, cedar and plum notes that great California cabernet has. It was not in the newer, modern, fruit bomb style. This was a big, brawny intense wine. He was right, it wasn’t mature and probably could have gone another 10 years easily. But it was amazing. Really amazing. In fact it was one of the best California cabernets I’ve ever had. The only thing that comes close was a magnum of 1976 Cuvaison cab I tasted in 1991 and a 1986 Diamond Creek Gravelly Meadow that I had in 1996. The tannins were tamed by the fatty richness of the steaks and the creaminess of the cheese. The fruit was rich, dark and intense. It was one of the finest cabernets I’ve ever had. The real irony was that I was also preparing for a beer lecture I’m supposed to do this weekend. Nothing like great wine to get you focused on beer.

April 30th - Pasta with Sausage and Tomatoes

April 30th – Pasta with Sausage and Tomatoes

Pasta is still one of the fastest things you can make for dinner. The plan is pretty easy. Sauté some things together in a pan and toss it with cooked pasta. What could be simpler or faster? Pasta sauce doesn’t have to be an all day affair. In fact, most of the “sauces” I make for pasta can be prepared by the time the pasta cooks.

So, I had decided on pasta and the Black Olive and Orange Sausages were calling to me. Even though it’s not really a traditional Italian flavored sausage (it’s actually more Eastern Mediterranean or Greek) I still wanted to use it for pasta. I sautéed some onions in olive oil and let them brown a little and then threw in two sliced up sausages and browned those. The sausage already had a lot of garlic so I didn’t add more, but did add some tomatoes and let all that reduce. Once the pasta was done, I drained it (reserving some pasta water in case I needed to use it in the sauce) and then tossed it in the pan with the sauce. Put it on plates and grate a little cheese on. Simple.

For no special reason, I pulled a pint of my Steam beer, just because I felt like having something hoppy. Ideal match? Maybe not, but it was a great beer and the pasta was fantastic. The hop bitterness helped to cut some of the richness and it had enough malt body to stand up to the robust flavors. Although I like to match food with wine or beer, it doesn’t always have to be rocket science, and sometimes just having what you’re in the mood for will work.

Sesame Noodles and English Bitter

April 29th - Sesame Noodles and English Bitter

I was looking for something quick to cook and decided to make sesame noodles, which I hadn’t made in a long time. It’s another dish that I love but rarely seem to cook. I prefer to use whole wheat noodles because I think the nuttiness works well. The great thing about sesame noodles is their versatility. You can top them with shrimp, leftover shredded chicken, thinly sliced pork or beef, or sautéed tofu. I had some shrimp and opted to us those

The basic dressing is pretty simple: tahini, toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, Chinese chile paste, a drop of sherry, and either a little lemon juice or rice wine vinegar to cut some of the richness. I basically just mix them all together in a bowl and adjust it until it tastes right to me. Cook and drain the noodles, toss them with the dressing, and add whatever vegetables you want. I used shredded carrots and scallions, but you could also add bean sprouts. I stir fired the shrimp in oil and then put them on top. You can garnish the whole thing with some toasted sesame seeds and cilantro as well. Although it’s not traditional, a nice squeeze of lime juice adds a burst of brightness it.

It being a quick casual dinner I hadn’t really thought about what to have with it, but I had picked up a can of Boddingtons Bitter at the Asian market. I will confess: I love canned beer. Canned beer has a stigma attached to it and there are still many people, beers snobs included, who think that canned beers have a metallic taste. They don’t. I don’t think they have in quite some time actually, but certainly the new generation of canned beers don’t taste metallic at all. Cans have a couple of key advantages over bottles: they don’t let light in, and they have are less prone to oxidation. Don’t believe me? Go get a bottle and a can of Pilsner Urquell and taste them side by side. The canned version will taste fresher and won’t have that light-struck skunkiness to it. In fact, at a tasting I’m conducting this weekend, I insisted on cans and the organizer still insisted on bottles. When we taste the beer, I’m sure it will have the light-struck quality that many people now associate with imported pilsners.

Back to the Boddingtons. Boddingtons draft bitter is a canned bitter that uses a widget and nitrogen to give a smoother, creamier mouthfeel which is supposed to emulate actual draft beer. Although the mouth feel is different, I like widget beers, although they can mask the aroma of the beer when it’s first poured. Boddingtons is deep gold color, but has a beautiful malt and light fruitiness aroma. It’s lighter bodied (which a good Bitter should be) and easy drinking, but it has a very solid malt richness. Because it’s such an easy drinking beer, it’s easy to overlook how good it really is. It’s actually quite good with Chinese food. The creaminess of the body (from the nitrogen) helps to cut the saltiness, and it has enough malt character to mix well with the mild heat. Although I hadn’t thought it would be an ideal beer, it reminded me how food friendly real Bitter is. It seems that some of the best beers with food, are the ones we don’t pay much attention to because they’re not big and flamboyant on their own. Keep that in mid the next time you’re trying to plan a menu around a an Imperial Stout or Double IPA.

Pork Kebabs and Fennel Orange Salad

Pork Kebabs and Fennel Orange Salad
April 27th

Although I cook all kinds of things, my cooking is still most heavily influenced by Mediterranean food (particularly Spain, southern France, and Italy). It’s something that I’ve strayed away from more in the last couple of years, but it still is a huge influence and draw for me. The current issue of Saveur magazine has a great article on the cooking of Cyprus, which includes a great pork kebab recipe. Kebabs are found throughout the Mediterranean, but you don’t see them made from pork as often as from other meat, like lamb. But many countries, like Spain and Cyprus, that were under Ottoman or Muslim rule (where pork isn’t eaten), do have recipes for pork kebabs were the marinade shows Ottoman and Muslim influences. The Saveur recipe uses herbs like oregano and thyme, but also uses sweeter spices like cinnamon and cumin. Like most recipes I look at, I didn’t exactly follow it and did make a few modifications.

Many kebabs call for leaner cuts of meat, but there’s a lot to be said for fattier, tougher cuts like shoulder, provided you marinate them long enough and then cook them long enough and over low enough heat. Leaner cuts can get overcooked and dry out pretty easily, even if they’re marinated (how many dry kebabs have you had in your time?). I used pork shoulder for mine and then grilled them outside over moderate heat. I kept them pretty far from the heat after an initial sear and let them cook for a total of about 45 minutes or so. The meat was still juicy and wasn’t tough.

On the side I made a salad of shaved fennel, oranges, black olives, lemon juice and olive oil and some roasted some potatoes with lemon zest, oregano and olive oil. (Oranges and black olives are amongst my favorite flavor combinations. The sweetness and slight acidity of the oranges marries perfectly with the salty, brininess of the olives). I served yogurt on the side for the meat (and the potatoes too actually). I had picked up a Butte Creek Organic IPA and had that as well. I’ve liked all of the beers I’ve had from Butte Creek, particularly their pilsner (at last year’s Oregon Brewer’s Festival) and their porter. The IPA is good but has a pretty distinctive Victory malt note to it that I’m not that fond. (A lot of people clearly are if sales of New Belgium’s Fat Tire are any indication.) Despite the slightly heavy handed Victory malt note, it’s still a nice beer. It’s got good hop bitterness and flavor but isn’t over the top. It leans a little more to malt than many IPA’s do (not a bad thing in my opinion). The beer was great with the food, but frankly, the kebabs were so amazing that most any beer would have been seemed great with it.

Homebrew Update

Homebrew Update
April 26


I had a bad cold several weeks ago and missed an opportunity to brew as well as the Portland Cheers for Belgian Beers festival that I had been looking forward to. But there’s still beer at home and some things have gotten brewed.

The Brown Ale is still kicking around, and with its malty intensity, it’s still my favorite current homebrew for spicy food. I am afraid it’s going to run out fairly soon however, but it’s holding well, particularly for a lower alcohol, low hopped beer.

The Biere de Garde/Biere de Noel (call it what you want) has really come into its own. It’s dried out as it’s lagered and is now crystal clear, but still pours with a rich, long lasting head. It’s still sweeter than a regular Biere de Garde should be, but it’s incredibly flavorful with great malt and light esters in the nose. It’s still something I’m considering entering into the Collaborator contest, but I have a few others I’m debating as well. It’s a little high in alcohol for a lot of hotter foods (the chile heat brings out the alcohol), but it’s fantastic with roasts. I made a pan roasted pork tenderloin with a cherry sauce (dried cherries, shallots, white wine and stock) that I served over mashed potatoes with glazed carrots last weekend and it was phenomenal with that. I’ve been tapping it so often, I’m worried there’s not a lot left, but I can always make it again).

Our updated Steam beer is still around, but I also wonder for how long based upon how good and drinkable it is now. It’s also the only hoppy beer I have at the moment, so it gets tapped pretty regularly. It’s got an intense citrus/orange hop nose from all of the Simcoe and Summit hops. It’s another one I’m considering for Collaborator, but I don’t know how it would stand up amongst all of the other hoppy styles that I expect will be in there. If nothing else, I’m enjoying it on my own.

The Belgian Golden from about a month ago is drinking well, but still needs to come together completely. We used two yeast strains in it (the Duvel strain and the La Choufe strain) and the Duvel strain takes a long time to clear. Clarity and appearance are only 3 points out of 50 on a BJCP score sheet, but it’s incredible how much clarity really does affect perception of a beer. I’m hoping it will clear soon, but it’s been kegged and chilled for the last two weeks and really hasn’t improved much yet. The nose has developed nicely and has a spicy, orange note to it. Belgian Goldens are amongst my favorite beers and I normally have one on hand because they’re food friendly, but it will be nice when this one finally clears up. I have several bottles, and strangely the bottles have cleared at room temperature, but the keg is still cloudy. We’ll see on this one.

The last beer we brewed was a Saison. The grain bill is the same as our Saison that won Collaborator, but the yeast is the same mixed strain we used of the golden ale (as a way of saving money and re-using yeast). We realized that we hadn’t made this recipe in about 2 years although it’s a favorite of both of ours. It’s still in secondary, but it could be kegged at any point and I may try to get to it soon just to have a little more variety.

Black Olive and Orange Sausages

Black Olive and Orange Sausages
April 26, 2007


I haven’t made sausages in a few months (although I had made some bacon and pancetta) and wanted to get another batch done. Although I love most sausages, I try to make varieties that lend themselves to being used in different dishes as opposed to varieties like brats, where all I want to do with them is grill them and throw them on a bun. Some of the varieties that are easy to work into other dishes are Italian sweets, Spanish Chorizo, Cajun Andouille, and Portuguese Chourico. All of them work well with beans, pastas, soups, etc. I had been thinking about something with Mediterranean flavors and decided to make some pork sausage flavored with black olives, oranges, cumin, cinnamon, coriander, marjoram and oregano.

The basic recipe was:

4 lbs Boneless pork shoulder, ground
4 tbsp kosher salt
1 tsp dried Greek oregano
1 tsp dried marjoram
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp ground black pepper
Zest from 2 oranges, finely chopped
Juice from one orange
10 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 cup of pureed black olives


Mix the all the ingredients except for the ground pork in a bowl and mix them together. Then combine this mixture with the pork. Let it sit in the fridge for several hours (or overnight).

It’s a sausage that works well in bulk or in links. (I put most of mine into 32-35mm hog casing, but left some in bulk). You could also use lamb, beef, or even chicken instead or pork, but I’m fond of pork sausage and use it about 95% of the time I make sausage. I took some of the bulk mixture and made a stew of with onions, tomatoes, chick peas, and the sausage and then served it over rice. You could also grill it and then slice it and use it as a tapa or meze.

I did have a Sierra Nevada Summerfest while I was making the chickpeas and sausage stew. Summerfest is a pilsner-style lager which is incredibly refreshing and has a faint, but noticeable hop bite in the finish. It’s a terrific seasonal beer that I look forward to every year. With dinner, I had a Lagunitas Maximus IPA. I like most of Lagunitas’s beers very much (I must confess that I’m not a big fan of the Brown Shugga, but love the Imperial Red, IPA and Pils). The Maximus is a big beer at 7.5% alcohol and about 70 IBU’s. It’s a great beer, but it was a little big for the food. I probably would have done better to have the Maximus while I was cooking and the Summerfest with the food. There’s always next time.

March 28th - Hopworks Urban Brewery

March 28 – Hopworks Urban Brewery

Hopworks opened last Tuesday and apparently was mobbed on the first day. Since they had our El Diablo on, we wanted to get over and taste it. We had planned on getting there at about 5:00pm and were hoping to beat the rush, but I got delayed at work and didn’t get there until about 5:30pm. My brewing partner was already there at the bar when my wife and I got there.

They’re serving the El Diablo in goblets, which is good since it clocks in around 8.5% alcohol. The nose is spicy with good candy and honey notes. Although it tastes fairly full on the palate, assistant brewer Ben Love, let us know that it had a terminal gravity of 1.3 plato (about 1.0005) which makes it drier than most pale ales. It’s one of the best domestically produced Belgian Golden’s I’ve had. Yes, I’m biased, but I was really surprised at how authentic it tasted. It’s considerably drier than most of domestic Belgian style ales. I was also delighted to get a couple of bottle to bring home.

In addition to the El Diablo, I tasted through a fair amount of the other beers. The HUB lager is still one of my favorites. I’m very fond of the pilsner at Max’s Fanno Creek, but the HUB lager is no slouch. It’s a little lighter in body than Max’s, but is very clean with a great hop bite and is full of Saaz flavor and aroma. After the El Diablo, it may be my favorite of Hopwork’s beers. The Crosstown Pale is a hoppy but incredibly drinkable pale. It’s got an assertive hop character but doesn’t spill over into IPA territory. It’s a terrific food beer, because it has a lot of character but isn’t big and overwhelming. The Velvet ESB is more English style with a great malt character and a more subdued hop character. The Survival Stout, with its grain bill of barley, wheat, Oats, Amaranth, Quinoa, Spelt, and Kamut, is a great beer as well. It has an intense coffee and roast/black malt nose, but has a smooth, rich, round character to it. IPA is still a hallmark NW style and Hopworks is a great example of the style. It’s got a great malt backbone to stand up to the hops, but the emphasis is still hops. I had tried the beer previously at last year’s Oregon Brewer’s Festival, when the beer was being brewed at Golden Valley in McMinnville. The current version brewed on-site at Hopworks seems more balanced and more intense though.

When we had brewed with them, the test pizzas that their chef was working on had been impressive and the large pepperoni we ordered was actually very good. I’m form NY originally and in NY we’re pizza snobs. Luckily their chef learned to make pizza on the East coast and the pizza is really good. I ended up eating entirely too much, which was probably OK since I ended drinking too much as well (my wife wasn’t drinking and she as driving). I’m looking forward to going back, but am going to wait at least a few weeks until the crowds die down a little. If you haven’t been, you should. It’s well worth it.

March 27th - Red lentil Soup and Brown Ale

March 27 – Red Lentil Soup and Brown Ale

I had to work this evening and got home a little late and didn’t feel like cooking much but luckily had some leftovers. I love legumes in general and particularly love red lentils which I use in a variety of different soups (Turkish inspired variations, Indian inspired, etc.). One of the recipes for red lentil soup from the Padma Lakshmi cookbook I had form the library was a Indian spiced red lentil soup that had chopped up prunes added at the end.

Prunes are another food that’s gotten a bad rap in this country. Many people think of them as a laxative but not as something you’d actually want to eat. I love plums and love prunes and was given a five pound box of amazing prunes from a farm in Dayton, OR by a client at work. When I cook with prunes, I normally pair them with pork (braised pork and prunes, sautéed loin chops and prunes, pork roast stuffed with prunes, etc.) and was intrigued by this red lentil recipe. Essentially it uses the prune’s sweetness to offset the heat of the spices and chiles.

I will admit, I changed the recipe to suit my own tastes and for what I had on hand. I sautéed some shallots, gingers, garlic and green chiles in oil until translucent and then added turmeric, ground coriander, ground cumin and ground fenugreek (essentially making curry powder). Next I added the red lentils, canned tomatoes, and then some homemade chicken stock. I let this cook until the lentils were soft and were starting to fall apart. I pureed it with an immersion blender and then added about 10 prunes cut up into small pieces and half a bunch of chopped cilantro. I let those sit in the soup for about three minutes and then served it.

I made the soup last week, but still had some left last night so I used the last of it and had a par baked baguette with it. The soup was considerably hotter than I thought it would be (I served it with a dollop of yogurt the first time). Anyone who’s read my blog before likely knows my love of sweeter, malty beers with spicy food. I still had some of the brown ale left and had that with it. My brown is sweeter than most of the commercial examples (because I like it that way) and is rich and soothing with very hot food. In fact, I enjoy this beer more with hot food than I do on its own, where it can seem a bit fat and too heavy. Further proof of how important matching beer with food is.

March 26th - Roasted Chicken and NW Steam Beer

March 26th - Roasted Chicken and NW Steam Beer

I have a co-worker who’s been asking if I’ve eaten for the last several weeks because I haven’t posted an actual “what I’m eating" entry, so here goes. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge fan of roasted chicken. Few things are as easy and ultimately as satisfying. Antony Bourdain has the best commentary about roasting a chicken in his Les Halles Cookbook. I normally brine chickens before I cook them but last night I didn’t have any time, so I just stuffed it with garlic and lemon, trussed it (you absolutely must truss a chicken) and put it in a 400 degree oven. It was a small bird; only a little more than 3 pounds. I let it go at 400 for about 20 minutes and then turned it back down to about 350 until the last 5 minutes or so and raised it back to 400 to make sure I got a crisp skin.

I had started to make stock with the neck and giblets, and used some of it, along with some white wine, to deglaze the pan to make gravy. I kept the sides simple: mashed potatoes with buttermilk and horseradish and some orange and vanilla glazed carrots. (Steam the carrots in orange juice, vanilla extract, and olive oil. When the carrots are tender and the liquid has mostly evaporated, turn the heat up high to get some color on the carrots. It smells vaguely like carrots cooked with Creamsicles, but the end result is very good. The vanilla seems to accentuate the sweetness of the orange juice and carrots.)

I had an absolutely horrid Fiddler’s Green IPA while I was cooking. Well, I tried it but didn’t really drink more than a few sips. In all fairness, it’s not the brewer’s fault. It was just old and tired and had a distinctly sharp and acidic, oxidized hop bite. Fiddler’s Green is brewed by Matt Brewing Company in Utica, NY (the makers of the Saranac brand). I’ve seen some things online referring to it as an English style IPA, but the nose was distinctly American. Again, I can’t really judge it because it was horribly oxidized and tired. It also seemed distinctly East Coast. On the west coast, it would be considered a Pale Ale because it didn’t have enough punch to be an IPA.

With the Fiddler’s Green poured out, I opted instead for a Full Sail Ltd No. 1 Lager. There’s a real knee jerk reaction to larger craft breweries amongst some beer snobs, because many seem to think you can’t be large and brew good beer. Full Sail (amongst others) disproves this again and again. This is a tough beer to nail down stylistically, but it’s a very nice beer. It’s brewed with pale malt, chocolate malt, and crystal malts, and uses Hallertauer and Styrian Golding hops. It’s dark copper and exhibits a lager-like cleanness. It’s got a restrained nose but has a distinct caramel note in the finish. It doesn’t seem to fit any historical style, but it’s a great beer. Who needs styles anyway?

With the chicken I pulled a pint of our recent Steam beer. Legally the term steam beer only refers to Anchor, who holds a copy write on the phrase, but prior to this the name referred to a style of beer brewed by German immigrants in California. Essentially, it was brewed with German techniques but adapted to new environments and conditions. Nowadays, it’s also referred to as California Common beer. The most distinctive thing about Common beer is that it’s brewed with lager yeast but at ale temperatures. As a result, it has a cleaner fermentation profile (ie, less fruity esters). The version we brewed is an updated version with a Northwest spin. We used a Munich lager yeast but fermented it around 60 degrees for the first week and then at about 66 degrees for the second week. Ours has a good malt backbone but is more bitter and has a lot more hop aroma and flavor from a hefty addition of Simcoe, Sterling, and Summit hops in the finish. It’s medium bodied but assertive. The bitterness of the beer was a nice backdrop to the sweetness of the carrots, but didn’t overwhelm the chicken. It’s still a little young, but it’s developing nicely, and may be one of our Collaborator entries this year.

March 26th - Cookbooks I've Been Reading

March 26th –Cookbooks I’ve Been Reading

At this point there’s no way to reconstruct what I ate for the last six weeks, so I’ll just talk about a few of the many cookbooks I’ve been reading.

Several months ago, I was browsing at Powell’s and came across a treasure: a used copy of Elek Magyar’s classic The Gourmet’s Cookbook, which is one of the finest books ever written on Hungarian cuisine. Magyar, by his own admission, wasn’t a cook himself, but he was a “foodie” who wrote this book in 1932. It didn’t appear in English until the 1970’s. Many people don’t think about Hungarian food when they think about refined haute cuisine, but the food of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was amongst the most ornate cuisine ever produced.

Magyar’s book is similar in many ways to earlier works like Escoffier or the Larousse Gatronomique. It’s not a book that teaches you how to cook. It’s a book that assumes you already know how to cook (and can cook well). It’s an encyclopedic collection of haute Hungarian food, in all of its fat laden glory. There are many recipes per page, because the recipes are really just outlines and often don’t list specific amounts. It’s a fascinating book to read because it covers so much and with incredible authority and surety. Modern readers and cooks may find the food too heavy and unhealthy, but it’s an incredible collection that illustrates the breadth and refinement of Hungarian food. It’s a book, like Escoffier and Larousse, which I’ll read cover to cover but will rarely cook from. (That’s not a bad thing in my eyes). It has already become one of my favorite cookbooks. It’s well worth tracking down a copy.

At the same time that I bought Elek Magyar, I finally bought a copy of Mangoes and Curry Leaves by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. I’ve already plugged this incredible book on the food of the Indian subcontinent before, but their books are so good, that they deserve to be plugged on a regular basis. More cookbooks should be as informative and beautiful as theirs are. And unlike many beautiful cookbooks, their recipes actually work as well. The recipes for Pork Vindaloo and Pepper Rassam are amongst the best I’ve seen. I finally bought this book, now you should too (and all of the other fine books they’ve written).

I’m a huge fan of Mark Bittman. His How to Cook Everything is one of my favorite all purpose cookbooks. While it doesn’t have the greatest recipe for everything, it does have good ones for pretty much everything. I use How to Cook Everything often when I need to find a basic recipe as a jumping off point for something that I’m planning. I was happy to see that he now has a How to Cook Everything Vegetarian book out. I got it from the library (OK, my wife got it for me) and was sad when I had to bring it back. Bittman is full of his usual no-nonsense advice and is a champion of demystifying cooking. In particular I loved the sections on legumes and grains. It’s on my short list of cookbooks I need to go buy.

I love dumplings of all sorts and was thrilled with Brian Yarvin’s A World of Dumplings. A lot of single subject cookbooks can seem a little skimpy, but this is a great book with a wide variety of recipes from around the world. Yarvin defines dumplings as anything that’s wrapped in dough, so there are recipes for Asian dumplings, ravioli, samosas, pirogue, empanadas, etc. Although many people may still start with pre-made dumpling wrappers, Yarvin’s enthusiasm will likely convince some people to make their own. In addition to clear instructions and pictures, there are good stories about his search to find authentic recipes and instructions for all of the types of dumplings that he writes about. He had me breaking my bamboo steamer out within a day of getting the book.

In general, I’m wary of most East/West fusion cookbooks because many of them are so bad and have recipes for food that just doesn’t work. (Afterall, not everyone can be Jean-Georges Vongerichten.) I was wary when my wife got Padma Lakshmi’s Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet from the library. After all, Padma Lakshmi is a former super model and had a role in the Mariah Carey movie, Glitter, both of which wouldn’t lead me to believe that she could actually write a decent cookbook. But the book is actually quite good. I didn’t really test many recipes but read through most of them. Many of the recipes are Indian inspired (not surprisingly since she’s Indian), but have clever fusion twists. In general the soup recipes intrigued me the most, although a bunch of the other recipes read well. I was happily surprised with this book.

March 25th - Beer Update

March 25, 2008 - Beer Update

OK, I haven’t added anything here in quite some time and for no good reason other than laziness. Just to get going again I thought I’d start with some beer related updates.

On February 14th, we were able to brew our Belgian Golden Ale at Hopworks Urban Brewery with owner/brewer Christian Ettinger and assistant brewer Ben Love. The grain bill recipe was pretty straight forward: 86% pilsner malt and 14% organic sugar (by weight, but that means about 25% or more of the fermentables are coming directly from the sugar). We mashed in somewhere around 146-148 degrees or so because we wanted a very dry style of beer. They used Magnum hops for the bittering (about 10 IBU’s there) and then two later additions of French Strisselspalts for flavor and aroma (total of about 10 IBU’s between the later additions). The yeast was the Chouffe yeast which is one of my favorite strains. The original gravity was around 18 plato and I haven’t heard what the terminal gravity was, nor have I been able to taste the beer yet. But Hopworks opens today, so I’ll taste it soon. What we were designing was a very dry, almost Duvel-like beer but with more of the Chouffe spiciness to it. They started the fermentation in the mid-60’s and were going to let it rise naturally to whatever temperature it wanted. They also under oxygenated it to push for more esters. My brewing partner and I had a great time and want to thank Christian and ben for putting up with a couple of homebrewers in their way all day. They also fed us a bunch of their pizzas which their chef, Andy, was still in the process of perfecting. Andy is a talented chef and definitely knows how to make great pizzas (maybe because he’s originally from the East Coast).

Assistant brewer Ben Love came up with the name El Diablo, which I think is a great name for it. It will be available at Hopworks on draft and was used as one of their entries into the World Beer Cup which will be held in San Diego in mid-April. El Diablo will also be Hopworks entry into the local Portland Cheers for Belgian Beers festival to be held at Roots Organic Brewery on Saturday April 5th. The Portland Cheers for Belgian Beers festival is an interesting idea. About a dozen different breweries all brew a Belgian style beer but use the same yeast strain and then go and taste each other’s beers. It gives everyone an opportunity to learn more about that yeast strain and how it behave with different malts, fermentation temperatures, etc. It’s all done in fun and proceeds go to charity.

On the homebrewing front, I have a couple of new beers on draft. The English bitter and all the Belgians are gone, and the molasses porter is down to the last gallon or so. We brewed a Bier de Garde several weeks ago. Bier de Garde is an obscure and fairly misunderstood style of beer. It’s French in origin and comes from the farmhouse brewing tradition of Northeastern France (French Flanders). It’s a style that had almost completely died out but is having a bit of a Renaissance thanks to the growing popularity of craft beer. Bier de Garde’s are generally amber beers with a full malt flavor, but with a dry finish. They often have some subtle herbal notes as well, but the big malt nose and flavor are in the forefront. They are often brewed with lager yeasts but at fairly warm temperatures (58-60 degrees), so they have some esters, but still have that clean lager crispness. Ours is brewed with pilsner, Vienna and Munich malts, with a small portion of aromatic malt. It ended up slightly sweeter than I had hoped but is still a very good beer. It’s slightly alcoholic (about 8%) and is drying out a little bit as it sits and lagers. In competition it may do better as a Bier de Noel, which is stronger and often sweeter seasonal version of Bier de Garde.

Using the same lager yeast, we brewed an updated Portland style steam beer. The grain bill is similar to the legendary Anchor Steam Beer, but we used a combination of Centennial, Summit, and Sterling Hops. It has a little more bitterness than the Anchor version, plus a lot more hop aromatics. It was just kegged a few days ago, so it will need a few more days to come around, but is already, a nice, moderate strength beer with a great hop nose. Since we were completely out of Belgian beers, we had to brew another Belgian Golden Ale (since it is one of my favorite styles and a great food beer). This version is being brewed with the same combo of the Chouffe and Duvel yeasts that we used last time. Next up with in the brewing queue is a Saison using the same yeast. We won a Widmer Collaborator competition with our Saison several years ago and realized we hadn’t brewed that recipe in about two years or more, so it’s time. Plus Saison is another favorite style and a versatile food beer. That’s a quick update on the beer front. I’ll try to get something about food up here soon as well.

February 3rd - Black Bean, Potato and Corn Cakes with Mango Salsa

February 3th – Black Bean, Potato Corn Cake with Mango Salsa
I’ve been trying to cook more vegetarian food of late (ironic at a site called Meat for the Masses) and had an idea early in the morning on what to try for dinner. (I find myself thinking about what to cook for dinner pretty early in the day). We had some leftover black beans in the fridge and I thought about beans cakes but wanted something with more flavors in it and thought about black beans, corn, and potatoes as a base and figured I would add some other things to it as well. Since all of those are pretty hearty flavors, I figured something brighter tasting like a fruit salsa would be a nice contrast.
I made the salsa from mango and added a little diced onion, diced green chili, lemon juice and mint to it and let it sit for about 45 minutes so the flavors could blend. It had good sweetness from the mango and mint and the lemon juice added a balancing acidity. The onion and chili gave it some punch but nothing too extreme.
For the actual cakes, I used some crushed black beans (I just crushed them roughly by hand), some thawed frozen corn (it being February and all), diced onion, garlic, some Mexican oregano, some diced bell pepper, dried red chili, and some ground cumin. I tossed all of this together and then heated a pan. As the pan warmed up, I grated a few russet potatoes and then squeezed the liquid out of them before adding them to the black bean mixture. (Grated potatoes turn black quickly, so I like to prep everything before I do that to minimize the oxidation.) I added some corn starch as well to the mix to help it stay together. I realized that the mix was a little loose and may be tough to flip, so I decided to make one large pan sized cake that I would cut into wedges (and that could be flipped easily with the help of a plate). I cooked it on medium heat to get a good crust but also to allow it enough time to cook everything all the way through.
When it was done, I slid it out of the pan and cut it into wedges and served the mango salsa on the side. The flavors were awesome and the salsa was a great contrast to the crusty cake. I would like to figure out a way to make the mix a little more solid so I could do smaller cakes as opposed to one large one, but I’d want to minimize the use of flour or anything else that might mute the flavors. None of the flavors in the cakes overwhelmed anything else. You would get bites where you tasted different components clearly but everything was a good mix. You could pick out individual flavors of each component but everything was well balanced. The salsa was a bright contrast to have on the side.
I had initially thought about doing a darker sweeter beer with this, but still had most of a pint of English bitter that I had poured while I was cooking, so I just kept to that. This is the same homebrewed bitter I’ve written about in the past, but it’s in a nice phase right now. Some of the fresher flavors have diminished but the caramel and nutty flavors seem better integrated and the hop aroma has taken on a nice slightly flora and tea-like aroma. The beer actually seems better integrated now than it did a few weeks ago, although I normally think of this as a style of beer that is best drunk young. It was a refreshing beer with the food, and complimented the flavors. The slight sweetness picked up the caramelized notes of the crust and the sweetness of the corn. It was a happy accident that I ended up drinking this beer instead of the brown ale or porter that I had initially thought about.

February 2nd - Roasted Chicken

February 2nd – Roasted Chicken
I haven’t roasted a chicken in a couple of months, which is weird for me since I like to roast one at least every two weeks. When the stove went out on New Year’s Eve, the thermostat also went out, which makes roasting or baking a little challenging since it requires a manual process of checking the temperature and turning the oven on and off at the right time, but it can be done. I brined a chicken, like I normally do because it leads to a juicier bird that is also far more forgiving if you overcook part of it. I made some stock with the neck so I would have something to deglaze the roasting pan with to make gravy. I stuck to simple stuff on the side: mashed potatoes and a few onions and carrots in the roasting pan with the chicken. I stuffed the chicken with sprigs of rosemary and some sage leaves out of the garden and then cut a lemon in half and squeezed it into the cavity and then put the squeezed out halves in the cavity as well before trussing the chicken.
A lot of people don’t truss a chicken or just tie the legs together, but trussing is an important step. It helps to make the bird more compact and round for roasting. If you do it right, it brings the wings up slightly over the breast which keeps them from cooking too quickly and getting dried out. Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook has great directions on roasting a chicken including how to truss it. If you don’t know, check the book out. It really is an important step.
It seems that I always drink wine after a day of brewing (and, let’s face it, drinking beer). I pulled a bottle of 1995 Chateauneuf du Pape La Bernadine from Michel Chapoutier. I love Chateauneuf du Pape in general. The wine contains a large amount of Grenache, but is also blended with many other grapes, including some white grapes. Chapoutier is an older producer in the region but the wines in the last 15+ years are now amongst the best wines in the entire Rhone Valley. The La Bernadine had deep rich aromas of cherry fruit and spice, but had a little less spice than Vieux Telegraphe, which is still my favorite Chateauneuf du Pape. It was bigger and richer than a lot of other wines that I’ve had from the region. But the roasted flavors of the chicken and vegetables worked well with its intensity. Luckily my friend Colin is the executive chef for the US distributor and has been stock piling the Chapoutier wines for several years, so with luck I can have another one when I go to Chicago to visit him next.

Februrary 2nd - Brewing Lambic

February 2nd – Brewing lambic

We brewed another 10 gallons of lambic today and also packaged the molasses porter from last time. The porter is fairly sweet (which is what we wanted) and has a subtle molasses flavor. It’s just enough to taste it but not so much that it overwhelms the other flavors. It’s still a little young, but it has some roastiness and a nice bitter chocolate quality. In addition to the molasses, there’s a caramel sweetness as well. It’s got a big rich, round mouthfeel and should be good in the cooler weather.

We hadn’t brewed lambic in a while (maybe four months or so). Our stocks of it were down to about 80 gallons which are all between 4 months and 4 years old. We had picked up the production of these a couple of years ago once we had a chance to taste the first ones and decide if it was all worth it. Sour beers are getting more popular and it’s good to see that more and more breweries are making them.

Our “lambic” is modeled on the real ones from the Senne Valley in Belgium. The grain bill is fairly simple: 2/3 pilsner malt and 1/3 flaked, unmalted wheat. Hops are used for the aseptic properties but not for their bittering qualities and brewing lambics requires the use of old hops. Hops are best at a couple of years old, but you don’t want them cheesy or moldy smelling. Ideally, they should be totally dry and reminiscent of dry hay in aroma. The traditional mash for lambics is a turbid mash which is a complicated process and is sort of similar to a decoction mash, except that in a turbid mash, you pull the liquid from the mash and then boil it and add it back in to raise the temperature. In a decoction mash, you pull the thickest part of the mash out and boil it. The enzymes that convert starch to sugar are water soluble and are in the water that you boil in a turbid mash and that essentially denatures the enzymes and deactivates them. Unlike most other types of brewing, you actually want unconverted starch in a lambic base because it will be consumed by one of the types of wild yeast down the road.

We don’t use a traditional turbid mash, but do a step mash instead. We mash in at about 122 for a 30 minutes protein rest to help break down some of the excess protein in the flaked wheat. Then we raise it up to about 156-160 in order to get a wort high in dextrins. Dextrins are a complex sugar that aren’t digestible by standard brewing yeast, but can be broken down by wild yeasts. The idea is to make a wort that has some easily fermentable sugars for the brewing yeast, but also has a fair amount of starch and complex sugars for the wild yeasts and bacteria that grow later in the process.

This time we ended up with a stuck mash which made for a long brewing day, but we made our way through it and ended up with 10 gallons of cloudy wort (cloudy than normal, but these beers will sit for about 2 years before being bottled). We added standard brewing yeast and will that work for about 1-2 weeks before we rack it into carboys and then add the wild yeasts and bacteria. We’ve gotten some Belgian Sour blend from White Labs and a tube of pure Brettanomyces lambicus. The major souring bugs in lambics are lactobacillus or pediococcus, both of which are bacteria and produce lactic acid, and brettanomyces, which is a wild yeast which gives some sourness as well as the characteristic barnyard and “funk” aromas to these beers. Lactobacillus can take several months to really grow, but Brett can take 6-12 months. The Brett aromas and complexity will grow over several years and the beer will become increasingly dry and steely.

The problem in brewing with all of these bugs is that they’re unpredictable. There’s no guarantee that all of them will grow and no way to tell which “bug” will become the dominant one. Each 5 gallons carboy is its own ecosystem and each one will taste slightly different, even if the base beer and bugs were the same. As a result, blending is a critical part of the process. We normally blend beers to roughly 25% one year old, 50% two year old, and 25% three and four year old. We can use as many as ten lots to make a single batch. Since having different lots of beers seems to add complexity to a blend, and since most of the bugs are available as blends and as single species, we’ve gotten in a habit of adding different bugs to different carboys to create as wide a variety of underlying beers as possible (even though they all use the same grain bill and old hops). Oftentimes, we combine leftover partial lots together increasing the complexity of the individual carboys and have found that the more lots you have, the better chance you have of making a successful blend. Currently we have a little more than 20 carboys of different sizes sitting around. Our blends are normally about 8 gallons, because that’s the largest bucket we have for blending and it gives a decent size batch.

Each batch we’ve blended has been different but there is a somewhat of a “house” style that we’re developing. Our beers are not as tart and sour as some of the traditional lambic houses, like Cantillon, but at our best, the beers have the right taste and characteristic aromas. I would like then a little tarter, but they’re tart enough to be refreshing and are generally equivalent in acidity to an average white wine. We’re working on getting the carbonation level high enough to really emulate the best commercial examples and aren’t quite there yet.

We don’t have any fruit batches going right now but will be investing in raspberries in a few months to make some framboise for the fall. Normally the beers need to sit for 4-8 months with fruit before being bottled. It’s best to let the beers age at least a year before adding fruit, since they still need the underlying complexity. We’ve done both raspberries and cherries, but so far the raspberry is the clear winner to me.

So we brewed ten gallons and built the stocks back up, but this beer will likely sit for at least 2 years before it’s bottled. We are planning on blending another lot in the next month or so, because we’ve built up enough stock that we should be able to bottled 2-3 batches a year without depleting our stocks too much. The main issue is making sure you keep enough of the beer back to get sufficient stocks of three year for blending. Strangely, the older lots, while incredibly complex, aren’t very good on their own. By 3-4 years, the beers are very austere and bone dry. They get a kind of steeliness to them as well. They add great depth of character to a blend but need younger beer as well to soften them. We had debated bottling some straight three year old but, on tasting it, realized it wouldn’t be the best thing to drink on its own.

February 1st - Pork Chops with Spicy Tomato Sauce and Roasted Potatoes

February 1st – Pork Cops With Spicy Tomato Sauce and Roasted Potatoes

I had more pork chops and wanted something vaguely Spanish for dinner, but also wanted something kind of quick. I brined the chops in salt water while I thought about what to make. My wife suggested romesco sauce, but I didn’t have any red bell peppers but thought I could a sort of similar sauce just using onions, tomatoes, garlic, almonds, pimenton, and crushed red pepper, but that wasn’t emulsified. I was envisioning something between romesco and the spicy tomato sauce that’s used for patatas bravas. With that in mind, I peeled some Yukon gold potatoes, tossed them with olive oil, salt and pepper and then roasted them in a cast iron skillet in the oven.

I browned the chops in olive oil in a pan and then pulled them out and left them on a plate. I added some finely diced onions and cooked them until they turned light brown and then added garlic, pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika), and almonds and let them cook for a few minutes. Then I deglazed the pan with fino sherry and added some tomatoes. I let it cook down for about 10 minutes and then pureed the sauce with an immersion blender to make a smoother sauce. (It had some small chunks for texture but nothing very large.) Then I added some more olive oil and whisked it in to enrich the sauce before turning it down and letting it simmer for a few minutes more. When the potatoes were almost done, I added the chops back to the pan with the sauce and let them finish cooking in the sauce.

I spooned some of the sauce onto plates, put a chop in the middle of the sauce, and added the potatoes to the side and then added a little more sauce on the side to use a s a condiment for the potatoes. Though it wasn’t a traditional Spanish dish, it had Spanish flavors. The sauce was wonderful and just spicy enough with the potatoes.

I’ve had a few bottles of Sierra Nevada’s ESB of late and really like it. It’s distinctly an American ESB but it’s a wonderful beer. It’s made with a combination of American and English hops and malts (see the website for the breakdown). It seems less hoppy than their pale ale, although their website states that it’s actually a little higher in IBU’s, but has a great hop aroma and subtle hop bite. There’s good malt to it with a slight caramel sweetness but it’s a well balanced beer that finishes very clean with a nice hop/malt balance. It’s a seasonal beer so it’s not around for too long but I’d encourage you to pick some up if your can find it. It was a great beer with this meal because it had enough body to stand up to all of the flavors but wasn’t so big that it tried to overwhelm the food. Although it clocks in at 5.9% alcohol, it has an easy drinking quality to it. Its balance makes it a great beer for food, but I could easily drink a few pints of it on its own as well.

January 31 st Spaghetti and Comments on Boxed Wines

January 31st – Spaghetti and Meat Sauce (Again) and Comments on Boxed Wine

I had some sauce leftover from the other night so I decided to just use it up and make spaghetti again. Not surprisingly, the sauce was better than a few days ago and made me sit and think, why don’t I make this more often? I did break down and get some inexpensive red wine to go with it. It was a California Malbec that had pleasant fruit but had a weird oakiness that made me think it probably spent a lot of time sitting on oak chips. At $6 it definitely hadn’t spent time in real oak. But with the food, the fake oak quality was subdued and it had a slightly rustic quality I like in wines with tomato sauce.

One of the better cheap wine alternatives I’ve found, actually, is boxed wine, particularly those from Australia, which is where boxed wine was invented. Other wine snobs may cringe at the thought, but it seems that the average box of Australian wine is generally head and shoulders over many other $6 wines. Plus it keeps longer than anything in a bottle. Sometimes you just need an inexpensive but drinkable glass of wine. Most of the Australian wines in boxes are softer styles that accentuate fruitiness and easy drinkability. They are not profound wines and they’re not meant to be. For reds, shiraz and cab seem to be the best bets. For whites, chardonnay and semillon seem the most common. It’d be nice to find a good sauvignon blanc, with it’s melon fruit and crisp acidity, but I haven’t come across any. Most of the brands I’ve tried, Hardy, Jacob’s Creek, and Banrock Station have all been fine. Again, these are everyday drinking and cooking wines, but they have their place and are actually a good buy. There are more and more boxed brands available from other parts of the world and some that I’ve tried have been quite good, but as a general rule, I’ve been happiest overall with the ones from Australia. This last bottle of malbec made me realize I should have invested in one of the boxed alternatives. And yes, I still consider myself a wine snob.

January 30th - Chicken Rice Pilaf

January 30th – Chicken Rice Pilaf

We’ve been trying to save money so I’ve been splurging less on food and I’ve been making a concerted effort to clear out the freezer and fridge to make more space. So I was rooting around for something to make and came upon various sundry items, including a small petit sirloin steak, a lone boneless chicken thigh, and a few other odds and ends that wouldn’t really make a meal. How do I end up with this stuff? I also had no potatoes, and not in the mood for pasta. However, we still do have about 15 pounds of basmati rice so I started thinking about a pilaf. We had used the last of the homemade chicken stock for the dogs (the dogs think that the stock is actually theirs and give me dirty looks when I use it), but I did have some canned stock that we keep around just in case.
I decided to make a rice pilaf with the lone chicken thigh and hoped I could find enough other things to make it a real meal. I started by sautéing a couple of finely chopped onions in a combination of olive oil and butter. When they were translucent, I added some garlic and the cut up chicken. I didn’t have any fresh ginger so I added some dried ginger, cardamom pods, saffron, cinnamon, cloves, rose water to the pan and let the spices cook to lose their raw flavor. Next I added a cup and a half of washed basmati rice and let it cook in the oil for a few minutes before adding a handful of raisins and about three cups of stock. I brought it to a boil and then covered it and lowered it to a simmer.

While it cooked, I toasted some shelled pistachios in a small fry pan which I figured I would add and stir in at the end. I normally add nuts last in a pilaf because I want the crunch and don’t want them to get soggy. A lot of pilafs that I’ve made have been flat tasting because I always underestimate how much flavor rice absorbs. This time I made sure that I added a lot of salt and enough spices to carry through the whole dish. I plated it and added a small spoon full of yogurt on the side as a contrast. The coolness and tang of the yogurt was a good foil to spicy richness of the pilaf. The raisins and spices gave a nice sweetness and the pistachios gave just enough crunch and texture.

I had a pint of the spiced tripel with it which went surprisingly well. Maybe it’s the fact that they both have some ginger, plus the tripel has a lot of fruit notes form the hops and the yeast. Considering that this beer overwhelms most food, it was nice to find something that it really worked with.

January 29th - More Indian Food and Brown Ale

January 29th – More Indian Food

So I appear to be on the ground beef roll here. It’s been three nights in a row where ground beef is the cornerstone of the meal. I still had some cabbage and carrots leftover from last Sunday and needed to use them so I decided to make some keema, the ground meat Indian dish, to go with it and to make a meal out of it.

I started by sautéing onions in oil until they were browned and then added ginger, garlic, ground coriander, cumin, fenugreek, turmeric, green chili, dried red chili and garam masala. Once all of the spices had cooked a little, I added the meat and browned it. I added some water and turned it down to a simmer. The dish smelled great but was a little bland looking. I wished I had some peas to add to give it some color but only had some spinach on hand. It’s not traditional, but there are keema saag dishes, so I figured it would work and it did add a nice note of color to the food. I served the keema, the reheated cabbage and the carrots (which I served room temperature) with some rice and pulled a pint of Brown ale, which has turned out to be a great beer with spicy food. Quick and it helped me clear out the fridge.